Here's who gave the store away to GE

[Octafish]

Reaganomics Revealed

EXCERPT...

Reagan’s story at GE is, to a startling degree, the story of labor relations executive Lemuel Boulware. When Boulware hired Ronald Reagan he was a conventional, patriotic, anti-communist liberal Democrat. He was not thought to be particularly well-informed or articulate. Under Boulware’s guidance, Reagan sparred with GE’s unionized employees and received what he termed his “post-graduate education in political science” from 1954 to 1962. He became thoroughly familiar with basic economics, and came to share Boulware’s strong conviction that business performs an essential public service. He also thought about a wide range of other public policy matters stretching even to the core concept of what was to become the Strategic Defense Initiative.

SOURCE: The American Enterprise Institute

[pulledpork]

1. You should have posted a warning

Any picture of that man makes me ill.

But yes, no denying the truth of the story there.

[Octafish]

5. Sorry! What the experts were saying about Ronald Reagan...

"He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace." -- House Speaker Tip O'Neill, after a meeting with Reagan, November 23, 1981

[pulledpork]

6. I was kidding

Well, about the warning necessity - but not the fact that he eternally makes me ill!

[Octafish]

9. I was going to run with this... a bit surreal, perhaps.

There's just something about unreality.

[pulledpork]

7. dupe nt

[Marblehead]

2. His best role

was president

[Octafish]

8. He's still scaring me.

Crisis Inspires Rethinking of ‘Reaganomics’

by Sam Zuckerman

Published on Sunday, October 19, 2008 by The San Francisco Chronicle

Big government is staging a comeback.

Former President Ronald Reagan’s stance against big government set the tone for economic policy. (David Ake / AFP/Getty Images) When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he famously declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Since then, conservative small-government ideas built on a foundation of deregulation and low taxes have dominated the debate over what role Washington should play in the economy.

Now the tide is turning, political experts on the right and left say. A combination of circumstances, including the resurgence of the Democratic Party and fallout from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, is giving impetus to wholesale expansion of government economic intervention.

“We’ve gone through a period of three decades when the default assumptions were conservative assumptions,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a policy adviser in the Clinton administration. “That framework has probably been torpedoed by events.”

If Barack Obama is elected president and Democrats strengthen their grip on Congress, the period could be transformative. Democrats would enact a series of programs that they believe would boost economic growth and improve middle-class living standards.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/19-0

As if.

[Marblehead]

11. pretty amazing

when Hollywood and MIC work together to screw the people, very scary
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/hollywood-war-machine/ here is a good vid about this subject

[Octafish]

14. Thank you very much for the link and info, Marblehead!

I look forward to viddying the docko later this nochy.

This probably is old to you, but for those who think Pruneface was all-right, a bit about Reagan and his Hollywood gang from Dan Moldea:

Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob

[Marblehead]

15. thanks

it's like an onion

[CBGLuthier]

3. The good that men do is buried with them BUT

the evil shit they pull can screw us for centuries.

[Octafish]

10. Two-terms and he did all that damage.

Then, again, he did receive professional coaching.

[Rage for Order]

4. Actually, no. It was this person (most recently, anyway):

The head of (GE's) tax team, Mr. Samuels, met with Representative Charles B. Rangel, then chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which would decide the fate of the tax break. As he sat with the committee’s staff members outside Mr. Rangel’s office, Mr. Samuels dropped to his knee and pretended to beg for the provision to be extended — a flourish made in jest, he said through a spokeswoman.

That day, Mr. Rangel reversed his opposition to the tax break, according to other Democrats on the committee.

The following month, Mr. Rangel and Mr. Immelt stood together at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem as G.E. announced that its foundation had awarded $30 million to New York City schools, including $11 million to benefit various schools in Mr. Rangel’s district. Joel I. Klein, then the schools chancellor, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who presided, said it was the largest gift ever to the city’s schools.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42260137/ns/business-us_business

Reagan actually had this to say on the matter (from the same article):

As it has evolved, the company has used, and in some cases pioneered, aggressive strategies to lower its tax bill. In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that G.E. — a company for which he had once worked as a commercial pitchman — was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes.

“I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,” Mr. Reagan told the Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to Mr. Regan’s 1988 memoir. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and forced G.E. to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.

[Octafish]

13. He was only helping a constituency...

...with a lot of money.

Superpatriotism

by Michael Parenti
City Lights Books, 2004, paper

EXCERPT...

p117

After Adolph Hitler took state power in Germany in 1933, he set about establishing a repressive reactionary government that abolished labor unions, drastically reduced wages, eliminated worker benefits, ignored occupational safety standards, privatized various state enterprises, heavily subsidized big business, and drastically cut taxes for the very rich. Hitler also pursued an aggressive foreign policy that sent tremors across Europe. He annexed Austria, the Czech Sudetenland and eventually all of Czechoslovakia, and launched a massive arms buildup that augured a major war in Europe.

It was not long before numerous US corporate giants, including Du Pont, Ford, General Motors, Texaco, General Electric, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Goodrich, Standard Oil of New Jersey, J. P. Morgan, IBM, and ITT were doing a booming business in the Third Reich, unable to resist the low wages, low business taxes, and high profits. Henry Ford, Irénée Du Pont, Tom Watson of IBM, Torkild Rieber of Texaco, and other plutocrats became great admirers of Hitler. "American corporations made a lot of money in Hitler's Germany; this, and not the Führer's alleged charisma, is the reason the owners and managers of these corporations adored him." There were other reasons why they adored him. Some, like Henry Ford, openly shared Hitler's anti-Semitism, and all of them welcomed his anticommunism, seeing Hitler as a savior who would vanquish the Soviet Union and rescue Europe from Red revolution. If the acts of political terror and mass murder perpetrated by the Führer disturbed the US plutocrats, they gave little sign of it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Parenti/Superpatriotism.html

Thank you, Rage for Order! Much obliged for pointing out a lot of the big stink emanated from our side of the room. In reality, our representatives want to be loved, too.

[Rage for Order]

17. It's sickening

While we, the commoners, fight over left vs right, Republican vs Democrat, the wealthy and the ruling elite are robbing us blind.

[True Earthling]

19. Good find... Rangel sells out while Reagan closes loopholes...

Who would have thought that.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Octafish]

16. GE Brings Big Mushroom Clouds to Rife

Glad you brought up the nukes, Tikki. From a more, eh, hopeful time:

Infact's General Electric Boycott

PEACE is breaking out all over! Or is it?

By Joanna Miller
Peace Magazine
Apr-May 1990, page 18.

In spite of improved East-West relations, the nuclear arms race continues at full throttle. In the first six months after the signing of the INF Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union deployed more nuclear warheads than will be eliminated under the treaty. And while START negotiations for further reductions drag on, development of nuclear weapons that will nullify these reductions continues. We should ask, "Why?"

One answer is provided by INFACT in its recent publication INFACT Brings GE to Light. (Many will remember INFACT for its role in spearheading the worldwide campaign against Nestlés' promotion of breast-milk substitutes in the Third World.)

"Nuclear weapons," says INFACT, "are big business. Transnational weapons corporations like General Electric first promote the nuclear weapons buildup and then produce these weapons of mass destruction at public expense for private profit.... Corporations do not simply make the weapons, nor do they passively respond to government requests. rather, the weapons corporations create both the supply and the demand for ever more costly and deadly nuclear weapons. Yet these corporate interests operate hidden from public view, accountable not to the public interest and safety but to the corporate bottom line."

INFACT's report carefully documents just how GE helps to ensure a spiralling arms buildup by marketing its nuclear weapons aggressively, by influencing government policies and decisions on nuclear weapons, and by influencing public opinion.

CONTINUED...

http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v06n2p18.htm

Oh, yeah. Every fricking thing.

[Quantess]

18. Interesting. Thanks for the thread.

[Octafish]

23. ''It says General Electric on it.''

Death Squads in El Salvador:
A Pattern of U.S. Complicity

by David Kirsch
Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1990

EXCERPT...

Various sources have reported the use of U.S.-manufactured torture equipment. Rene Hurtado, for example, explained, "There re some very sophisticated methods...of torture..(like the machine) that looks like a radio, like a transformer; it's about 15 centimeters across, with connecting wires. It says General Electric on it...."

SOURCE: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/deathsquads_ElSal.html

[hootinholler]

20. WOW! I'm impressed!

Something useful from the AEI.

-Hoot

[Octafish]

24. Notice a pattern to things?

He delivers a nationally newsmaking speech in support of Barry Goldwater and is thrust onto the national scene, becoming governor of a large state and then, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike, president.



Don't Just Question Reagan's Lunacy.

[NashVegas]

21. If You Were To Take All Corporate Donations to Non-Profits

And list them, we'd get an alternate national budget, I suspect.

[Octafish]

25. Gov spends about $2.4 Trillion. Fortune 150 Corp giving totals about $70 Billion.

Toss in the rest and say it totals $240 Billion, and it's still 10-percent. Either way, corporate profits are at an all-time high and corporate hiring is at an all-time low.

Something's not right. I mean, is.

[UTUSN]

22. Proud K&R #18 for my indefatigueable Oct !1 How've ya been?!1 n/t

[Octafish]

27. UTUSN! What television has done to my brain...

...especially the advertising. Probably old news to you. Stuff that's not on the tee vee:

Interesting General Electric media science discoveries:

What Television is Doing to You

Truth Addicts Anon
Rants, raves, and random thoughts from a concerned citizen and truth addict.
Saturday, December 09, 2006

Several years ago an article was published by Scientific American titled "Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor. It basically states that TV viewing is addictive, and people who watch excessive amounts of TV (as most American's currently do--our national average is 4+ hours per day) exhibit the same behaviors as those addicted to physical substances, gambling, sex, etc. Indeed the shift from left- to right-brain dominance that television viewers undergo releases endorphins into the nervous system. More interesting to me in that article was the mention of a 1986 study done by Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues that looks into the brain-wave patterns of people before, during, and after television viewing. I also found talk about a study done by Herbert Krugman, a psychologist and manager of public-opinion research at GE (owner of NBC) which monitored human brain waves to discover what the effects were when watching television.

Here's another a quote from another interesting article entitled "The Nature of Television," which speaks of the effect of the endorphins released into the nervous system by TV viewing.

"These opiates are structurally identical to heroin and opium and just like the drugs themselves, endorphins are habit forming and addictive. Krugman observed that whilst watching television, right brain activity is at least twice as potent as left brain activity. As with many other scientists, psychophisiologist, Dr. Thomas Mulholland, arrived at the same conclusions, notably that alpha waves appear just after thirty seconds of television viewing and that whilst watching television the viewer's brain falls into a virtual trance."

CONTINUED...

http://truthaddictsanon.blogspot.com/2006/12/what-television-is-doing-to-you.html

Wonder what other good things these monsters gangsters are bringing to life? Doesn't matter. You'll be fighting them with Truth, UTUSN.

[midnight]

26. Thanks for making the connection... G.E. and the unions....

[Octafish]

29. The unions, public and private, are about the last organizations capable of opposing the state.

From DUer Ardent 15, Rick Perlstein on how Pruneface learned to crush unions the "nice" way:

Labor historians, but few others, know what "Boulwarism" is. In 1946, the passing of unions' wartime no-strike pledge ushered in the greatest wave of walkouts in history. General Electric suffered terribly. But, when not a single one of G.E.'s subsidiary manufacturing companies struck, G.E. brass promoted the obscure marketing executive in charge of them, Lem Boulware, to vice president for employee relations. Boulware arranged for his title be changed to "vice president for public and community relations." It spoke to his vision of labor relations as guerrilla warfare. "Boulwarism," one labor relations text defined it, was the "attempt to win and hold the loyalty of the workers so as to counter-balance the power of the union."

And that's why unions, according to the crony capitalist class, have got to go. (Now that the commies are gone.)

[alfredo]

28. What you can't see in that picture is his other face.

[Octafish]

30. This one?

He should be on the back of the dime, all right.

[alfredo]

32. That is not the face of a Socialist labor leader. Looks more like an

asshole

That's more revealing than this picture of "The Duke." This might just be a fashion offense. There's no other explanation of the Raygun image.

[xchrom]

31. the whole thread is a good read. nt